According to Blake Ross, Director of Product at Facebook, the project “Focus On The User” has seen over 100,000 visitors in just 24 hours. How many of those visitors actually used its bookmarklet to perform a Google search is unknown.
People have asked about stats.We’ve seen over 100,000 unique visitors in the 24hrs since focusontheuser.org launched! #weekendproject
— Blake Ross (@blakeross) January 24, 2012
The project, which aims to show Google search results before the company pushed its “Search Plus Your World” changes, was started by members of the engineering staff at Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.
The project is a bookmarklet created as a weekend project, which lets you go back to seeing searches sans all of Google’s own search products, widgets, and links. The site itself has also become a central reference point for those saying that Google has lost site of its larger base of users, the ones who use search. While its social efforts are meant to increase usage on Google+, some see it as an annoyance for everyone else.
The success of the site shows that the subject of what should and shouldn’t be promoted in Google’s search results is most certainly a hot topic amongst the tech set, as the project has been covered by most large tech-focused publications. Search, Plus Your World has been added to the FTC investigation on Google’s potential anti-competitive practices, but it is not known whether any further action will be taken yet.
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